Keiana West
2018-2019 Fellow with
Student Sponsorship Programme,
South Africa
Williams College Class of 2018
Alumni Update:
Keiana is currently a Justice Fellow at the Equal Justice Initiative where she advances public history work surrounding our nation’s history of racial injustice, facilitates community organizing around the country, and assists with legal intake.
Fellow Bio:
Keiana graduated from Williams College with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Africana Studies. Throughout her undergraduate experience, she was deeply engaged with community organizing and education research in her hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She co-directed an organization called Converging Worlds focused on combating injustices in the prison system, and this allowed her to develop community programs, organize panels, and create a magazine to facilitate relationships between activism on campus and in the surrounding communities. As an Allison Davis Research Fellow, Keiana received two years of funding to conduct independent, faculty mentored research including the effects of race and gender on perceptions of high school students’ behavior and psychological support for behavioral concerns. She also studied abroad in Durban, South Africa, where she had the opportunity to study social and political transformation in the country and to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of a diversion program offered by the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders. The following summer, she completed a research internship at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she analyzed data and co-authored a pending publication on health interventions in Black churches. In the summer leading up to her fellowship, she and a peer were awarded the Davis Projects for Peace Grant to coordinate a social justice mentoring program with middle school students in Pittsfield. She is thrilled to continue her love for applied education research and non-profit work in Johannesburg